Thursday night photographs – Fish and cephalopod edition

I can’t abide reading or writing about American politics tonight, so I popped a Haldol and have been looking at pictures from my visit to an aquarium a few years ago. Cuttlefish are very relaxing.

The aquarium was the Aquarium of Western Australia. I was in Perth to check up on one of my mines – originally a strictly off-the-record gift from a grateful Frazer government to Keith after he was so successful in getting that nice Mr Whitlam kicked out in 1975. So much nicer than a knighthood.

Perth is quite a nice city in a thrusting kind of way – a little priapism of towers surrounded by red-brick houses, lovely parks and the gaudy, black-glass-clad abominations built for the newly rich to live in. These last are everywhere – lines of waterfront houses the size of small office-blocks, each looking like the architect had sold his artistic soul to a particularly malign and vengeful older god and then built an altar to it made entirely of glass and concrete reproductions of Michelangelo’s David. There were atria you could house 97 pensioners in and still have room for their dogs and a year’s supply of Depends.

Anyway, the aquarium was quite lovely, and dedicated to reproducing the various aquatic environments of Western Australia. The shark tank is incredible with a moving walkway (similar to the one in OceanWorld in Singapore) which takes you beneath rays and sharks and some quite terrified looking fish. My pekinese Fuzzbutt was desperate to tackle a particularly dyspeptic looking white pointer, but only managed to get a lot of dog slobber on the three-inch-thick perspex.

I hope you might indulge me if I post a few of my pictures. The quality varies due to the lighting, but these have been making me feel happy this evening. Click to embiggen massively.

The scorpion fish is pretty.

This is the best picture of a Leafy Sea Dragon I managed to get. All the others are cute yellow blurs. These things are simply incredible. It must have taken God hours to get each of those leaves right.

This Little Pineapple fish is a little blurry too, but it’s just so pretty. Its scales are thick and clear and almost crystalline.

Finally, the cuttlefish, who I communed with for quite a while. He’s quite adorable and peered out at me with great interest, circling around his tank to get a better view at each of the punters.

When Great Cthulhu comes back to crunch the world in his slimy maw, it will look something like that, although probably with more screaming and rending of flesh.

Dearest Margo, you shy old thing. How could you think I would not remember you? Meeting you was the only joy of that dry reception that the Premier held when I visited. Well, aside from the bit where the Deputy Premier got really drunk and tried to pick up his own wife. That was fun, too.